Losing What You Never Had How a Strike Changed Management's (Perception of Their) Network Position

This chapter demonstrates how social network analyses can be used to analyse social relations at the work floor. In particular, we analyse how the private and work-related communication between middle and lower management and workers changed after a strike. We focus on the network position of the manager and four supervisor's vis à vis the strikers. We find that supervisors become less central in the network which split into two cohesive subgroups of strikers and non-strikers after the strike. The supervisors and the manager became detached from the group of strikers, and specifically suffered severe loss of personal ties to these colleagues. Remarkably, many of the ties the manager reported before the strike, were not reciprocated by his (striking) subordinates and thus only existed in the perception of the manager. A similar pattern arises for the supervisor who supervised the majority of the strikers. This suggests that a strike confronted workplace leadership with a reality check on their network. We propose some preliminary explanations for management's network misperceptions, and how crises, such as strikes, clear the view on managers' network.